


On The Outside, Looking In

by creatureofhobbit



Category: The Stranger (UK TV 2020)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-30
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:20:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27806710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: Christine Killane is used to discovering things about other people, but wonders now what her life would have been like had she reacted differently to discovering who her birth father was.
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	On The Outside, Looking In

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eternal_moonie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eternal_moonie/gifts).



Discovering things about other people had been a way of life for so long; Christine no longer knows why, when she found out that Martin Killane was not her father, she hadn’t put much effort at the time into finding anything out about the man who was. She’s spent so much of her life discovering things about randoms: the blind date whose life story doesn’t quite add up, the obligatory affairs, even a few cases like her own where people have just found out about relatives they didn’t know they had and want to get to know their background before reaching out to them. Why had it been so easy to look into the lives of strangers, and not her own family?

If Bob had never contacted her, wanting her to dig up the dirt on the woman from the football club, Edgar Price would still be no more to her than the face in those old photographs of her mother’s, and maybe she would never know that she had a half brother Adam, two nephews Thomas and Ryan. But maybe if she had gone about things in a different way, if she had gone to Ed directly and approached him explaining she was his daughter, maybe things could have been different. She could have been there as part of the family group right now watching Ryan’s match, instead of watching from the sidelines, unable to reach out and let Adam know she was there.

Of course, she acknowledges that it may not have been perfect even if she had reached out to Ed – given his reaction when she had taunted him about having had another child he was unaware of, it’s entirely possible that it would have taken time for him to have accepted her, if indeed he ever would have. But she gets the impression that Adam may have been more open to the idea of her as a half sibling. Since she’s never properly met Thomas and Ryan, it’s harder to tell with them, but she likes to think that she could have been an aunt to them, someone they could confide in if they didn’t want to talk to their parents.

She wonders what kind of relationship she would have had with Corinne. If Christine had reached out to the family before the incident with the fake pregnancy, at a time when there was no scandal to be found in relation to Corinne, maybe they could have even been friends, bonded as family members. But if it had been afterwards, and she had discovered the same information, honestly she has to admit she would still have had the same view that Adam had a right to know, would still have told him the truth. Hell, she might well have researched Corinne even if she had been accepted into the family before that happened. It was what she’d been brought up with as Martin Killane’s daughter; discovering information about people was the only life she knew. It makes sense to her in a way the apple-pie life she imagines she could have had feels foreign to her somehow.

Christine watches Adam, Ed, Thomas and Ryan, is sure she can see the haunted look in all their eyes even though logically she knows she can’t see anything from as far away as she is, and knows that she can never approach them now because if it hadn’t been for her, maybe Corinne would still have been with them today. She’s never going to become a proper part of their family, and she knows she should just walk away, not look back. Yet another part of her can’t resist looking after them as they walk away, thinking about the family she could have had.


End file.
